Dark Needs at Night’s Edge – Immortal Needs Fulfilled
Dark Needs at Night’s Edge is book five in the “Immortals After Dark” series by Kresley Cole. How do I put this delicately?…. Oh, yeah. This book is AWESOME! AWESOME! I picked it up, thinking to myself, how is Kresley Cole going to take this premise and make it credible?
A ghost and a vampire… Really? How is that going to work? And so I started reading, and it kept building, and building until the next thing I know, I am finishing the book, and I feel like screaming out loud in celebration. At least I would have had it not been almost 2 am. So, does this book deliver? YES!!
At first, I was not convinced that the vampire Conrad Wroth (other brothers Sebastian and Nikolai previously introduced in books 1 & 2) was going to get a fair shake at a decent story when his female lead was going to be played by an eighty-year-old prohibition era ghost named Néomi, who is trapped to haunt in a dilapidated estate in New Orleans.
At first, I don’t see how they are ever going to interact. Néomi can use telekinesis to move objects around; she can “trace” or teleport herself from one place on the estate to another, much like the vampires can move around instantaneously to places they have been before.
Some time after Conrad’s brothers, Nikolai, Sebastian, and Murdoch, have imprisoned him and started the rehabilitation, he begins to believe that perhaps the ghostly visage that he spotted before might not be an object of hallucinations borne of the stolen memories that plague his mind, but that she might actually be a real ghost. It is at this point that Néomi and Conrad begin to interact in earnest.
We learn as the story opens that the tragic events leading to her present on the estate, which is her anchor and in part her prison, since she cannot exceed the boundaries of the estate itself. Néomi is attracted to Conrad, even at the beginning of his imprisonment, when he is covered in mud and blood. Even though he is different than any other male her limited life has ever experienced, she is drawn to his power, and most importantly, his intensity. Intensity can often be an overlooked asset in a male.
Conrad, for some reason, was the first and only person ever to have sensed her presence, and though she didn’t know he was doubting his sanity, and that was why he didn’t actively react to her or speak to her, she sought to force him not ignore her by doing what she knew would work best. She set out to seduce him. Apparently, having grown up in a burlesque house gave her skills that she was not going to let go to waste around her vampire.
That is when things start to get spicy! One thing that the lack of a corporeal body makes you aware of is that seduction need not only be a physical act. One of the hottest scenes of the books, he can’t feel her because she is merely a spirit, she can’t affect him physically because he has not been “blooded” by his bride, and therefore lacks the ability to get physically aroused, but they do a really good job of dirty talking each other to notches unknown.
So, if they are this good at the verbal relation, imagine when they get down to the real deed. It might as well go nuclear. And later on, it sure does. Néomi reaches a point when she decides that she has had about as much of the spirit life as she can handle, and she hires Mariketa (she’s the witch we met in book three) to give her a body.
With a body, Conrad has his most fervent dream realized; she is his intended Bride, and as a blooded male, he and Néomi can consummate for real what has only been hypothesized about up to this point. There is a saucy little secret about Conrad that makes this joining all the more intense, and plenty of paper is dedicated to this special event. HOT, HOT, HOT! But beating fate has its price.
Conrad and Néomi’s relationship was going to be fraught with issues from the start. Conrad is a powerful vampire, a hazard of his occupation as a contract killer—he has accumulated the collective power and memories of his past kills. As a result, he has powerful enemies who want him dead for different reasons, also a hazard of his occupation as a contract killer. Any number of demons and secret sects are looking to kill him for vengeance or for the information he has stored in his stolen memories, and countless others just want to collect on the bounty on his head.
As a spirit, she is protected from his enemies. As a mortal with a body and a pulse, she is Conrad’s fulfillment, but she is in danger every second from those who hunt her vampire. I don’t want to give away anything at the end because it is way too gratifying, and I expect to hear that someone else wanted to give a loud cheer at the end of this book.
This series just keeps getting better. Onto the next! Book 6: Dark Desires After Dusk.
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